CACAO BIOLOGY, CHOCOLATE CULTURE (original) (raw)

The ancient domestication and pre-Columbian uses of cacao show ways that people related to the delicate ecology of the cacao tree. Cacao linked people to each other, the plants, animals and places around them, and to the divine. Cacao was an eye of the storm of colonial desires for profit and order and countercurrents of the dark and brutal forces of social inequality and resistance to them. Treatises dealing with cacao show that the colonial ecology of knowledge was not just of plants and animals, but also the dynamic social metamorphosis of gender, labor and race.